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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AN OLD RELIGION 



BY 



J. C. F. GRUMBINE 



AnDldRelibidn 



A STUDY 



BY 



/ 



■■1 



/. C. F. GRUMBINE 




CHICAGO 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 

1889 






^^■^^ 



Copyrighted, 
By J. C. F. Grumbine. 






TO 



CLAEA E. STOWELL 



whose interest in my life and work has been a source 



of joy, this book is lovingly dedicated. 



CONTENTS, 



PART' I. 



The wide and rapid spread of Free Thinking. The 
growth and decay of the Church. Number of 
Christians in the world. Timehness of natural 
religion. Why Robert Elsmere was attacked. 
Reasons for the belief that the old faith is de- 
caying. The decay of ecclesiastical imperialism 
and biblical authority. Condition of society 
relative to the Reformation. Church patri- 
mony denounced. Frederick II and his work. 
The decay of the Italian system. Murder of 
Huss and Jerome of Prague. The dawn of 
experimental philosophy. The Jesuits led by 
Ignatius Layola. 

The rise of sects and denominations. Irreconcil- 
able difference. The age of reason. Christi- 
anity and the religion of Jesus, how related. 
Supernatural religion improbable. The correct 
position as shown by Professor Huxley. All 
truth is scriptural, all knowledge revelation, 
all morality authoritative. The new creed. 
Mythology very persistent. The moral law 
omnipresent. Religion a necessity. Man no 
longer a slave to a metaphysical word. The 
authority of duty in reason and conscience* 



PART II. 

The Church aware of her own weakness. The 
young life and the ultra doctrines of philoso- 
phy. The claims of the Church disarmed. The 
real state of affairs. The increase of crime and 
general sin. The curse of industrial slavery. 
What the Church can and ought to do. Bolt- 
ing against the natural method of living. The 
creed of the Protestant Church shattered. 
Remedies proposed. Doctor Dix's theory. Rev. 
James Wasson's theory. The Liberal's theory. 
The efficient remedy. The emphasis on the 
moral side of religion. The foundation of 
morals and the authority for duty. Christianity 
ought to be free and democratic. Man's object- 
ive point as told by Rev. M. J, Savage, Rev. E. 
E. Hale and Rev. Doctor Gladden. Where the 
Church must Stand. True Religion. 

PART III. 

What will be done. Fatalism. The doctrine of least 
resistance. Happiness an object of life. The 
universe is right. Trust in God. The gospel 
of love. Judge not at all. The reign of love 
consistent with God's w^ill. True religion is 
the apprehension of the method of the uni- 
verse. God all in all. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Mathew Arnold remarked that we cannot 
do without Christianity and yet we cannot en- 
dure it as it is. The Pauline, Calvanistic 
and anti-rational interpretations of Christian- 
ity are not as popular to-day as some are apt 
to imagine, yet they form a large percentage 
of what is commonly called Christian thought 
and Christian teaching. The author of this 
essay seeks to disarm tradition of authority 
and so far as it is possible to rescue Christ- 
ianty from the perils to which it has for 1800 
years been exposed. No method of exegesis 
or no new rationale of interpretation is em- 
ployed. Supernatural Christianity has lost 
its hold upon thoughtful minds and every- 
where, by the testimony of human experience, 
the proof is positive that the church as the 
palladium of anti-Christian doctrine or as the 
exponent of fetish revelations is her own 
destroyer. 

We have had enough of the God that books 
have killed. We need and will have a God 
that theology cannot caricature, a moral law 
that cannot be relaxed, a church that will be 



8 



humanitarian. I have much sympathy for the 
so-called masses of our population who curse 
the church for her infidelity and perjury and 
who run after false gods,bend the knee to the 
mogul of finance, revel in sin, and, enthroning 
satan in their lives, sell their birthright for a 
mess of pottage. And I have much sympa- 
thy for that so-called select society to whose 
cold embrace so many worthy people clamor 
for privilege, that adores God as one may ad- 
mire a painting, that libels him in life, and, like 
Fedora in Balzac's charming story, ** The 
Magic Skin,'' gloats over broken hearts and 
ruined lives. They all are fulfilling their fate. 
Nor ought I to pass upon them any judgment. 
Let those who use theatrical piety, as spurious 
and common an article of trade as commercial 
and social etiquette, speak of its wearing?qual- 
ities. Although, like the night, it hides many 
sins and crimes, it wears a dress most decolette 
at the heart and a mask most thin and trans- 
parent. I do not vindicate the action of that 
big majority of whom I spoke who, estranging 
themselves from religious organizations, bring 
up their children to shun the church as if she 
were a scorpion. Worldly as the church may 
be she is not altogether a blind leader of the 
blind nor does she seal her lips and close 
her eyes to the sufferings of society. She 
would do many things if she dared, and I 



look anxiously for the hour when the church 
will disentangle herself from the world into 
whose meshes she has fallen as to champion 
anew man's inalienable rights and seek to do 
God's will and not her own. 

The alarm is given for the old but ever 
new, the original or the natural religion 
which will vindicate itself, not by miracle or 
the gag law but by the reasonableness of its 
doctrine and the immaculate truthfulness of 
its requirements. The salvation of the church 
depends much upon the kind of relig- 
ion she teaches. Her decay is assured 
when she loses confidence in God, respect 
for man's reason and ceases to be *'the light 
of the world." 

J. C. F. Grumbine. 



PART I. 

It is a significant proof of the widespread 
and far-reaching effects of free-thinking and 
liberal culture in America, England and Ger- 
many to find liberal Christianity winning 
favor among a people where false faiths and 
preternatural religious beliefs have found 
many enthusiastic apologists. Indeed, it may 
be taken as a startling announcement of the 
timeliness if not feasibility of the adoption of 
either a new Christianity or a rational generic 
religion by a people among whose institutions 
and in whose very civilization supernaturalism 
and the Christian mythology has nestled, 
when we find, as is actually the case, by stat- 
istics compiled by the New York Independent 
(Feb. iS88) that nearly three-fourths or 55,- 
000,000 of the entire pupulation of the 
United States is unchurched and in the doc- 
trinal use of the word, unchristian, and but 
19,000,000 of the possible 65,000,000 are 



13 

members of or attendants upon the regular 
services of the church. It is not, therefore, 
an encouraging sign of the success of the 
church, if her strength is to be estimated by 
numbers, to find after twenty centuries of ex- 
perimental Christianity that so large a propor- 
tion of the people in the United States alone 
should seem and be so indifferent to the or- 
ganized and working Christian church. And 
when it is remembered that there are less than 
10O5O00.000 of alleged Christians in the 
world and 700,000,000 of believers in other 
and apparent equally supernatural relig- 
ions, such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, 
Brahmanism, Confucianism, Sintoism and 
Judaism, we are, on the one hand, more than 
alarmed over the future of the present church 
and, on the other hand, more convinced of 
the steady growth and practicability of natural 
religion. Perhaps the reason why such a 
book as "Robert Elsmere" was attacked on 
the one side of the Atlantic by Mr. Gladstone 
and on this side by Rev. Dr. McCosh, ex- 
president of Princeton College, is because 
through it Mrs. Humphrey Ward seeks to 



13 

show that Christianity is not all there is to 
religion, that it is local and exclusive and 
that at best it is but a feeble expression of 
the Eternal. *'I see/* says Robert Elsmere, 
*'God*s purposes in quite other proportions, 
as it were. Christianity seems to me some- 
thing small and local. Behind it, around it, 
including it, I see the great drama of the 
world, sweeping on, led by God, from change 
to change, from act to act. It is not that 
Christianity is false but that it is only an im- 
perfect reflection of a part of truth. Truth 
has never been, can never be, contained in 
any one creed or system." And to show how 
deeply rooted liberalism is in modern thought 
I need but instance the fact that despite the 
rather inadequate criticisms of these two emi- 
nent scholars this book has been swept on to 
popularity, its doctrine has everywhere been 
studied and accepted while the author has 
been received with joy as a voice crying in 
the wilderness 'Trepare ye the way of the 
Eternal.'* 

I shall give the reasons why I believe that 
the present faith is decaying and why the age 



14 

is ripe for the construction and reception of 
an old but new religious cult. In speaking 
of the decay of the present faith I shall con- 
fine myself to a brief discussion of first, the 
decay of ecclesiastical imperialism and sec- 
ond, the decay of biblical authority. 

Relative to the Reformation ecclesiastical 
imperialism was a dominant factor in civiliza- 
tion. Literature was compelled to submit 
her manuscripts, science her knowledge, art 
her products and industry her triumphs to 
arrogant and petulant church rulers. During 
these periods blind credulity nestled in the 
church. Law stood for despotism, privilege 
for indulgence, heresy for persecution and 
martyrdom. Yoking herself to the state, 
the better by the union to gain universal 
prestige and authority, the church became an 
octupus, stifling civilization in the cradle, 
and smothering all fresh kindled reforms. 
With the audacity of Nero she cut her 
way into power by rapine, cruelty and 
murder, and with an alleged piety un- 
paralled for its hypocricy and proverb- 
ial for its disimulation, she posed before 



15 



the world as the bride of Christ. At times 
weakened by internal dissentions or over- 
whelmed in peril by the signal victories of 
science, she whined at the feet of monarchs 
and made overtures to princes, the better by 
their influence to advance her kingdom. 
Failing to win power by intrigue she desper- 
ately warred against all opposers, and, in 
many instances where defeat threatened her 
purposes, she would play lago to an emperor 
as treacherous and mercenary as herself. It 
was during the reign of Frederick II. (A. D. 
1218-1250) that the papacy seated at Avignon 
in France received its first fatal blow. 
Schooled in the wisdom of the Arabians and 
favorably disposed toward Islam he sought 
to rationalize the government by essaying to 
abolish the temporal power of the pope and 
the dominance of the church. And he paved 
the way for the more successful attempts at 
reform, both in civil and religious affairs, 
which in the year A. D. 1384 were made by 
Wickliff and Huss, when the bible was first 
translated into English and the nefarious doc- 
trines of absolution, monachism auricular 



i6 



confession, celibacy, worship of saints and 
transubstantiation were vigorously opposed. 
Protected by military upstarts the church 
sought by means of the excommunication^ 
the interdict and a crusade, to suppress her- 
esy, to impeach and punish sovereigns and 
thus retain and fortify her power. With a 
grasping avarice unknown in the history of 
the most brutal and self-seeking kings, she 
confiscated property, seized vast estates, 
reared for her priesthood magnificent resi- 
dences and overawed the world by the won- 
derful architecture and gordeous appoint- 
ments of her cathedrals. After lifting her- 
self to an equality with kings she revelled in an 
extravagance and corruption which hastened 
her ruin. Irreligion among the mendicant 
orders, the carnival of immorality which 
characterized the life of the papacy at Avig- 
non, the publication of heretical books, the 
effort made at the Council at Constance to 
convert the papal autocracy into a constitu- 
tional monarchy, which led to the brutal mur- 
der of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, the 
disorganization of the papacy itself, the infi- 



'7 

delity of the Templars, all hastened the doom 
of the intellectual influence of the Italian 
system upon Europe. And despite the fact 
that supernaturalism, adulterated by all man- 
ner of of chimerical imagery, spread as a be- 
lief over credulous Europe, the intellectual 
impulse from the West and the reassertion of 
the moral influence from the North irrisista- 
bly undermined and effectually crippled the 
Romish church. When at last experimental 
philosophy, like a frightened child, emerged 
from the darkness of this age of faith and 
maritime discoveries awoke continental Eu- 
rope from its nightmare of religious folly, 
when the study of Greek literature and phil- 
osophy was resumed in Italy, and the rise of 
criticism threatened Latin ideas, when print- 
ing Avas invented and the pulpit was made 
secondary to knowledge as an authority, 
then the Reformation, like some crashing 
avalanche, came thundering down from the 
North upon the boastful and tottering institu- 
tions of madiaeval Europe. 

As Protestantism swept over the continent 
ecclesiastical imperialism was weakened and 



i8 



the authority of the church was abridged. 
Desperate but futile efforts to destroy the 
Reformation were made by the Jesuits, a 
fanatical order founded by Ignatius Layola 
A. D. 1540. The spirit of what seemed 
like freedom brooded over the monarch- 
ies of Europe and everywhere the Re- 
formation became a flaming torch blazing 
in the midst of decaying institutions, a 
degenerating church and a demoral- 
ized humanity. Pale-faced skepticism stole 
forth from its hiding place and the angel of 
learning, like the sun, transfigured the world. 
New forms of the old grievance and new 
methods of gaining power obtained even 
among the leaders of the Protestant move- 
ment. But its spirit was moderation, its aim 
was lofty and humanitarian. Whatever can 
be said against the Reformation it cannot be 
denied that it rescued the Western world 
from an ignominious death. Science slowly 
but steadily gained a foothold, multiplying 
her forces and becoming an acknowledged 
authority among dissenters. Yet she was sus- 
piciously regarded by both the two church fac- 



19 

tions. Still she persevered, and at last, in the 
nineteenth century, after a long and bitter con- 
flict with the church she was given the throne 
of sovereignty — at least she so thoroughly revo- 
lutionized the methods of religious thinking 
that she became a forcible and influential arbiter 
of truth. When science became the test of all 
knowledge and the state refused to be dictated 
to by the church ecclesiastical imperialism was 
at an end. 

When the church lost her power over the 
world as the sole arbiter of human life then 
followed rapidly the impotency of all her 
important functions. All eyes were turned 
to the bible and it was read and studied with 
more than exceptional interest. As a result new 
creeds were formulated and a sturdy impetus 
was given to denominational Christianity. 
The old feud was now fought along new lines. 
As long as humanity was willing to be guided 
by a sectarian interpretation of the bible, or to 
accept without investigation the popular creed 
of Christendom, so long did the bible continue 
to be the undisputed word of God. But there 
came a crisis, to even the Protestant religion. 



20 



induced partly by polemical controversies, 
partly by idiotic adherence to false interpreta- 
tions of the bible or pet presuppositions, and 
partly by a scathing denunciation of and an 
unbridled contempt for science and literary 
critcism. 

The same irreconcilable differences which 
drove M. Renan from the Church of Rome 
led many others to repudiate all forms of or- 
ganized Christianity and setting up cults of 
their own to indulge in all manner of specula- 
tion. True to reason, man has at last learned 
to seek God not in any single event of past 
history, as Mrs. Ward says, but in one's soul, 
in the constant verifications of experience, in 
the life of love. **A11 things change," she 
adds, **creeds, philosophies and outward sys- 
tems but God remains/' Inconsistencies of 
creed, unscientific views of religion, super- 
tentient or supernatural aspects of Christian- 
ity have long since proven to be inefficient in 
saving the world. Man seems to believe that 
much of the teaching of the church in con- 
trary to nature, experience and to all rational 
ideas of religion. He has seen how through 



21 



an evolution of hardly 2000 the church has 
so multiplied her cults, so diversified her 
forms of organization, so complicated her 
methods of work and so deviated from primi- 
tive Christianity, that Jesus in the first and 
Christ in the nineteenth century stand for 
different ideas. Unwilling to become a doc- 
trinarian without first investigating the 
grounds for belief in this or that form of the 
Christian religion man has pondered Christian 
evidences and Christian polemics to find that 
the text itself was so incomprehensible, the 
evidence so untrustworthy and polemical dis- 
cussion so tempered by bias that a positive 
definition of Christianity could hardly be con- 
structed. He must either accept the miracles 
and declare Jesus God, the supernatural and 
declare Christianity the revealed religion, or, 
repudiating the evidence of the supernatural 
as the data of the imagination or the incoher- 
ent testimony of tradition and excluding it 
from the forum of legitimate evidence, he must 
construct a new religion upon the basis of 
natural law, or accepting the human side of 
Christianity, he must be content with its mor- 



22 



als as its characteristic and worthy feature. In 
matters of intellect, says Professor Huxley, 
man should ever follow his reason as far as it 
will take him,without regard to any other con- 
sideration and further, that he should never 
declare conclusions certain which are not 
demonstrated or demonstrable. A religion 
which cannot stand this test or that must be 
studied by a set of mental faculties wholly 
different from those employed in all other 
provinces of intellect is a religion that is in- 
tangible to human nature, impracticable in 
experience and an imposition upon society. 
The odium theologicum and the general protest 
which accompanied the rise and progress of 
natural religion, even while all forms of super- 
naturalism swayed and enslaved human na- 
ture, was but the consequence of independent 
research, the declaration of the sovereignty of 
natural law and a fearless effort on the part of 
a few men, not to make Jesus anything less 
than what he was, or Christianity anything 
less than his work, or the work of man, but to 
emphasize all truth as scriptural, all knowledge 
as revelation, all morality as authoritative. It 



23 

was but the reafRrmation of the fact which wa^ 
often forgotten and which can well account 
for the mythological character of much of 
Christianity, that all along the line of human 
life, as Darwin has somewhere hinted, and 
Draper has beautifully illustrated in his work 
on "The Intellectual Development of Europe," 
man has given to the world a constitution like 
himself. In a period of intellectual infancy 
his tendency was to superstition, in a period of 
experience, dimly guided by reason, it was to 
fetichism, polytheism or anthropomorphism, 
and in a period of life, in which man governs 
his human nature in accordance to the will of 
God, it is to theism. Granted, that all that 
there is for us to have as moral data or as 
ethics to guide us safely in this life, is as Rob- 
ert Elsemere said to the workingmen of Lon» 
don, a belief in God, in conscience and in ex- 
perience, a moral compass upon whose face 
the needle of the moral law vibrates in the di- 
rection of truth, love and justice, we shall not 
be left without what may be termed an author- 
itative religion. Through and by human na- 
ture comes the infallible code of moral laws, 



24 

as obligatory as any sinaitic revelation or the 
Christian beatitudes. This is a code of mor- 
ality which man can use, a revelation which he 
needs to the exclusion and abandonment of 
what are the mere trappings of theology or 
the inarticulate utterances of a fetich past. 
We undervalue no experience of man, we ex- 
tort from the past no false guarantees that 
what we think is truth. We demand of his- 
tory no vindication of its own testimony, but 
we rightfully declare that we too can think, we 
too are receptive of divine truth, we too can 
frame our religion and declare a faith in 
God. Only say let the dead fast bury its dead, 
A Buddhist or a Mohammedan, a Jewish or a 
Gentile bible is only valuable as it asserts, em- 
bodies or emphasizes divine law. We look upon 
all bibles as books of human experience whose 
testimony is only valuable to us as it voices the 
laws of our being and whose literature is no 
more sacred than the writings of Plato or the 
essays of Emerson. There will always be men 
idolatrous or ignorant enough to believe in 
mythology or in miracles in spite of the evi- 
dence of nature of the uniformity of her own 



^5 

laws of causation. To such all reasoning is 
in vain. Our duty is not to distort history nor 
to disbelieve the past because past. It is not 
to put new wine into old bottles or reconstruct 
and revivify the dramatis personse of bibles in 
accordance to the Psarier Resartus of society, 
but to call a spade a spade, and to show that 
the infallible bible of the universe is God's im- 
mutable laws. The error of the Church, which 
to some entent, has proven to be the error of 
mankind, is the thought that the revelation of 
our duty to one another and to God can only 
come through bibles or by the special fiat of 
God and when once given cannot be amended 
or revised. Like water, which is a composi- 
tion of hydrogen and oxygen it will never 
change its constitution, but remain the immac- 
ulate word of God as water ever remains water. 
And as the procession of cause and effect 
moved down the ages there would be nothing 
new under the sun which might or could con- 
tradict or even supercede as authority what 
was or is revealed to man in bibles. Whereas 
on the contrary, the universe has heard from 
time immemorial the revelation of God and man 



26 



from infancy has been granted audience to his 
maker. 

The doctrine of the verbal inspiration or 
the infallibility or the absolute completeness 
of the bible has long since been discarded as 
the puerile conception of half-witted Christian 
apologists and to-day when it said that the au- 
thority of the bible is decaying, it is to be un- 
derstood that the bible is no longer the only 
record of experience. It is not meant that the 
book is immaculately truthful as a whole, but 
that in connection with much heterogeneous, 
matter, it contains hints of the correct interpre- 
tation of our duty, of the moral law and of 
God's nature, so far as it goes and so far as it is 
possible for us to understand it. As in the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains much gold lies imbedded 
in the metamorphosed granitic rocks, so in the 
bible we can trace a vein of truth. We are 
realizing as never before that it is unnec- 
cessary for us to ask this man or that man what 
right is,or to go back two or five thousand years 
to Arabia, China, India and Palestine for our 
moral code, but that, following the law of our 
conscience and experience we will transcend 



27 

sin, and, with Jesus, receive upon our face the 
transfiguring light of the Over Soul. Thus is 
God near to man, always about him and God's 
law, the very condition of his safety. Although 
the authority of the bible decays he still dis- 
cerns truth, he still feels the omnipresence of 
God, he still realizes the grandeur and use of 
the moral law and he understands with Emer- 
son that the " Ought, *' that Duty is one thing 
with science, with beauty and with joy. Relig- 
ion becomes to him not unimportant but as 
necessary as the very air he breathes or the 
food he eats or the water he drinks. No longer 
will man become a slave to a metaphysical 
word as Saint Augustine did — such as trinijty, 
personality, God— but he will read the law of 
the universe in his experience, whatever it may 
be and find an authority for duty in reason and 
in conscience. 



PART II. 

The decay of biblical authority is so pro- 
nounced to-day that the Church is struggling 
hard to emphasize the authenticity and genu- 
ineness of supernatural Christianity by mar- 
shalling the best evidence of her apologists. 
She is seeking to destroy the effects of rational 
scholarship and scientific research by the re- 
assertion of her traditions. I have long since 
abandoned the idea that the present Church as 
organized, absorbed as she is in self aggrand- 
izement, will ever accomodate herself to the 
spirit of the rising generation, because already 
in the civilized world the young life is becom- 
ing estranged from religious institutions and 
is attaching itself to the wild but very fasci- 
nating doctrines of materialism, utilitarianism 
and agnosticism. The Protestant and Catho- 
lic Church is pushing denominational propa- 
gandism into the regions of insanity, by ad- 
vertising themselves to be most successful 
institutions, whereas in reality they have lost 



29 

their hold upon the masses and as Macaulay 
has well said, they, as special religious move- 
ments, reached their growth in the centuries 
in which they were born. I am not a pessi- 
mist, nor do I exaggerate facts. I believe in 
the office and work of the Church, the 
Church that is truly representative of the will 
of God, and it is on this account that I refuse 
to blind my eyes to the peril which besets her 
path. When so large a number of our Amer- 
ican population, fully three-fourths, are un- 
churched, where we naturally expect to find 
but one-fourth, and where the latest year 
books of all denominations show a gain in 
membership by no means commensurate with 
the local and general increase in emigrant and 
native population, we have fears that some- 
thing in the Church is wrong and ought to be 
remedied. And when the fact is added to this 
that not only idiocy,* insanity,* poverty,! 
drunkennesSjJ mendicity and pauperism, but 
also crime§ and prostitution,§ are on the in- 



*New York Sun. 

t" Progress and Poverty," by Heni-y George. 

tThe Voice. 

§New York Press. 



ML 



30 

crease, and that the more intelligent classes 
produce the most cunning criminals, a terrible 
blow to our present system of education, and 
also that the carnival of sin now rampant in 
our great cities is receiving fresh recruits daily 
from the smaller towns and villages, it may 
well be asked what will the ministry say and 
the Church do.|| And further, when it is known 
that the masses of our people are sinking 
deeper into the social sty by the curse of in- 
dustrial slavery and into conditions and tend- 
encies of living, from which there seems to be 
little hope of escape, and by which generations 
unborn will carry in their lives the evils of 
these dark days, we ought to be sufficiently 
alarmed over the grim evils, which breed like 

ijNot long since I had occasion to make the following state- 
ment in the Twentieth Century: *' With a population of about 
75,000,000 in the United States hardly 20,000,000 are church 
naembers. Perhaps I should overstate the truth were I to put 
the actual number of church members in the United States at 
15,000,000, for chiu-ch reports as given in the year books of all 
denominations are, above all things, I fear, most misleading 
and unreUable. "VVhen arrogant church members become 
aware of the fact that hardly one-sixth of the reputed popula- 
tion of the civiUzed Western world is churched, and that the 
perils which beset the Church are not confined to the city, and 
that the Christianity of the Protestant and Catholic Church 
bears little if any resemblance to the religion of Jesus, whose 
appelative she assumes and whose doctrine she professes to 
accept and teach, then and not till, then will they awaken from 
their indifference to all alarm and be willing to accept some 
feasible remedy."" 



3^ 

vermin in our midst.* I admit that the Church 
is not altogether to blame for this discouraging 
condition of things, yet I believe that crime 
could be checked, poverty and drunkenness 
abolished, insanity decreased, mendicity de- 
stroyed, and all other sins and wrongs modi- 
fied, if not obliterated by the help of the 
Church. It is not that the Church is incapable 



*[The following is authenticated and published by the Lon" 
don Star, and its imsuspected facts are but the echo of a sim" 
ilar condition of things in New York city, where, upon excel- 
lent authority, there are 32,390 tenements with a total popula- 
tion of 1,079,728 persons, of whom 142,519 are under five years 
of age]: 

"There are three hundred thousand of the very poor in Lon^ 
don. That is a normal state. These people are never properly 
housed, never properly fed, never properly rested. After they 
leave childhood they have no leisure. In the bad times they 
suffer actual starvation, relieved by the charity of their neigh- 
bors. Out of the half -million inhabitants of the Tower Ham- 
lets nearly ninety thousand are too poor to live. Twenty shil- 
lings a week is an average wage. A fourth of this is spent in 
rent. At least 16s. 4d., as Mrs. Barnett shows, ought at the 
lowest figure to be spent on food. But if all that is spent, there 
is only 3s. 8d. for the rent, instead of 5s., and there is nothing 
—positively nothing— for coals, clothes, boots, club money, 
schoohng, illnessesses. That is the normal condition, but loss 
of employment is always a factor with the unskilled laborer, 
who has often to fight a daily battle for his daily bread, and 
who — because there are more people in London every year, 
and the landlords take care that there shall be no more land- 
must, before he can even begin that struggle, pay a twenty- 
five per cent, premium to the land monopolist. This is the 
London of to-day. What may the London of to-morrow be — 
in a war, imder new commercial conditions, such as may arise 
in the attempt to diminish the cost of production and enhance 
the price of the product>— with less work for the laborer and 
more for him to pay for his bread, his salt and his coal? What 
a prospect is this that civilization offers its children! '^ 



32 

of doing this very thing, but seemingly unwill- 
ing — not that she lacks resources and backbone 
— but refuses to be guided by the right method 
of procedure. 

The present Church, seeking to save man 
by saving his soul for the next world, is kill- 
ing her influence in modern society. As an 
institution whose chief concern is the salvation 
of man through an ecclesiastical Christ, it is 
a failure. And as long as she continues to bolt 
against the natural method of living by trying 
to remake society after the plan of some hot 
headed theologian, she will accelerate her 
doom. Heaven and hell are no longer mo* 
tives for right living among intelligent hu- 
manity. Vicarious atonement as a doctrine- 
of Christianity is impotent and impracticable. 
The biblical cosmogony of the universe as a 
theory has long since been discarded as falla- 
cious and unnatural. Biblical theology as a 
conglomeration of Christian and Judaistic 
apologetics is not the potent factor in the 
modern religious life of mankind. About his- 
torical Christianity as about the Times' build- 
ing of New York city has been placed a. 



33 

new structure of thought. The old forms^ 
however, are lost in the new disguises and 
everywhere in the Church, a religion not of 
creed but of life, is gaining power and claim- 
ing attention. The Church is dangerously im- 
perilled by platforms of belief, which among 
communicants and professing Christians, have 
become essential tests of character. A skep- 
ticicism, more treacherous than the kiss of 
Judas, is betraying the church to the world, 
and, in the pew and pulpit, is carrying her 
immaculate Savior to a new crucifixion. Un- 
der false colors and, intrenched behind the 
preaching of the gospel of misunderstanding,, 
the Church is rushing on like maddened 
Ophelia to her doom. Refusing to alter the^ 
doctrine, which, by the consensus of mankind 
is futile, and desperately bidding for notoriety 
and cheap favors to keep herself intact, the? 
Church is playing the part of Doctor Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde with much brilliance but with no 
success. A grand ideal is rising up in the 
midst of what seems to be the Church's de- 
generation, and the age is boldly rewriting up- 
on the walls of the temples her inevitable fate. 



34 

Truly the warning is pertinent, " Mene-mene- 
tekel-upharsin." 

The Church has reached the crisis in her 
history. As long as she refuses to be guided 
by reason, as long as she slights the claims 
and spirit of humanity and rejects the impulse 
and facts of modern science, as long as she 
fortifies herself by a testimony of history both 
traditionary and irrational, circumscribes her 
path by corrupt and unhallowed intrigues or 
maintains her authority by audacious claims 
upon society and by terrible declarations of 
her divine commission, as long as she refuses to 
believe and teach that God has ordered all 
things wisely, so long will she paralyze her ac- 
tivities, kill her influence in the world and 
fritter away her prestige. All effort to keep 
her intact as thus constituted, with heart gone 
and her whole nervous system paralyzed, will 
prove to be as useless a labor as trying to re- 
vive a corpse by applying an electrical bat- 
tery. Many, m view of this fact have con- 
scientiously sought to revalidate the office of 
the Church— at least they have labored to 
evolve a plan by which the Church might regain 



35 

the power she has lost and become what the 
founder intended, the palladium of humanity's 
rights — the custodian of justice and truth. 
They have courageously acknowledged that 
something must be done if the Church is to 
hold her own among the leading and legiti- 
mate institutions of the world, and, with no 
little care, they have advocated reforms and 
innovations, the object of which is the central- 
ization of the religious forces, either about 
some present ecclesiastical organization, some 
common unit of belief or life, or some new 
cult. Whatever might be done in this direc- 
tion would, it is said, prove to be helpful to 
the Church and result in her general accept- 
ance by mankind. It is conceded that the 
Church is unchristian and aristocratic, exclus- 
ive and unpopular. To be a success is it nec- 
essary that the Church should be Christian, 
democratic, inclusive, popular ? Is the Church 
a failure because she is neither Christian, 
democratic, inclusive, popular, or is she a fail- 
ure because she has so diversified her forces 
and so divided her work that she has fostered 
sects and denominations at the risk of the vir- 



36 

tues; has thus condemned herself to the inev- 
itable effects of bad management; has sacri- 
ficed life for creed and the end for which she 
was organized for denominational or secta- 
rian supremacy? Or has she outgrown 
Christianity? Perhaps all these questions 
strike at the very root of the grievance. At 
any rate they involve the difficulties and 
touch upon the perils which circumscribe the 
life and work of the church. 

Three theories are advanced by able church- 
men as remedies for the existing state of 
things, I shall consider each theory in order 
and show how as remedies they are not only 
inefficient but inadequate. 

CURRENT INEFFICIENT REMEDIES. 

I. [Doctor Dix's theory of unity]. Rev. 
Doctor Morgan Dix, the eloquent rector of 
Trinity parish, New York city, in a recent 
sermon on the *'Apostolic Succession" (and I 
call it Doctor Dix's theory simply because it is 
a representative one) maintained that the long- 
hoped-for reunion of the different sects of 
Protestantism was only possible by an accept- 
ance of the doctrines of the Episcopal Com- 



37 

munion. And to illustrate how absolutely 
sectarian such a unified organization might 
be allow me to quote Doctor Dix's own words: 
"We believe that reunion is simply impossible 
except upon the apostolic platform, (which 
is a belief in the eternal God head of Christ, 
in the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Res- 
urrection, the return to Judgment and the 
Apostolic order.) To come together after a 
denial of the fact and the doctrine of Apos- 
tolic succession would amount to a rejection 
of historic Christianity and the substitution 
of a modern system having for its chief fea- 
ture complete indifference to positive truth 
and entire independence of authority, human 
and divine.'* His chief reason for believing 
that a Protestant union will be brought about 
in and by the Episcopal church is that she 
alone has the commission, she alone is the 
historic Christian church. Without entering 
into any discussion as to which church re- 
ceived the commission or which church is the 
Christian church let it be simply said in an- 
swer to Doctor Dix that there is every reason 
to believe that in the first place the apostolic 



38 

creed which he so ably magnifies as authori- 
tive Christian teaching is ungenuine as Mos- 
heim proves and that the Christian church is 
not to be determined by any apostolic suc- 
cession or commission, but by her works as 
Jesus said. It would be folly to ever expect 
a union of all the churches on a basis which 
he advances. For on the same ground one 
might seek to make an orange by combining, 
if possible, the characteristic parts of all 
other kinds of fruit. 

What is here strongly urged and presented 
might in some form be made the plea of all 
Christian sects and denominations — the one 
having the most power standing the first 
chance of becoming[the absorbent of all other 
religious organizations. For each denomina- 
tion might, with considerable display of bibli- 
cal evidence and by a presentation of proof 
texts, demonstrate that its doctrines are 
taught in the Bible ; * or further, it might 
show by skillful interpretation of parts of the 
synoptics, by a distortion of the meaning of 
a chapter through a perversion of the mean- 

* I here refer to any sect extant. 



39 

ing of passages, or by an allegorical and 
rationalistic f explanation of the miracles, 
that its creed is paralled in and vindicated by 
the Bible. And we may realize the force 
of this when we reflect that the various 
divisions of the Protestant and Catholic 
church all declare that what they teach as 
doctrine is really genuine Christianity, or has 
for its best apologist the Bible itself. Of the 
three hundred or more doctrines which seem to 
be described by the word Christian, few, if any, 
it is alleged, are foreign to the Bible. The 
question as to whether these doctrines are 
found in the Bible may be of little importance 
to one who rationalizes his experiences, and 
who attaches no more weight to the biblical 
books as testimony than he does to all literary 
memorials, yet the answer is of weight to 
those who still believe that the Bible is the 
immaculate word of God. For my own part, 
I am satisfied to know that even if the books 
of the Bible can be authenticated, and the 
writers ascribed proven to be the very ones 



t This is done chiefly by the Unitarians, who follow 
Strauss and M. Renan in their views. 



40 



whose names they bear, yet we shall not have 
settled the fact of their genuineness, nor shall 
we have removed the most collosal difficulties 
in the way of their acceptance. Granted that 
it can be proved that the gospels were written 
either at the close of the first or the begm- 
ning of the second century, how much nearer 
are we by that fact to proving that the au- 
thors of the gospels were true historians, men 
unmoved by prejudice or influenced by cir- 
cumstance ? And hence it would be necessary 
to re-testify testimony. Indeed, in order to 
get at history proper, a testimony of testi- 
mony would have to be prepared. To set- 
tle this would have much to do with con- 
firming any testimony man may have given, 
and, from an external point of view, of 
strengthening the evidence of the early 
fathers, concerning whom it is sometimes 
declared, and falsely, that they were unani- 
mous in bearing witness to the authenticity 
and genuineness of the four gospels. It 
would indeed be the most exact, satisfac- 
tory, comprehensive vindication of all contem- 
poraneous testimony. I do not say that 



41 

criticism grants us the right to allege that the 
testimony of Matthew, Mark, »Luke and John 
are unreliable, or that their qualifications were 
such as to unfit them for the work they per- 
formed. What I have no hesitancy in saying 
is that until evidence is marshalled to deny 
the above position, I have a right to refuse to 
accept the synoptics as the veritable life and 
work of Jesus. So far a man may be reason- 
able. Yet he may be reasonable in going 
still farther. He may, on the same ground, 
dismiss all doctrines of the Bible that appear 
to him to be inconsistent with any fair 
rationale of criticism, or that seem irrelevant 
to the natural explanation of thelife of Jesus as 
incorrect historical testimony. Such a position 
is defended by the fact that the very material 
which the rationalist would exclude from 
legitimate evidence, aside from its being the 
mere mythology of the age or the prejudice 
of the writer, is extraordinary and supersen- 
tient datum, having no bearing in the laws of 
natural causation and being in reality a palpa- 
ble trespass upon the uniformity of the order 
of the world's history. Aside from all this, 



42 

it is admitted by the most advanced schools 
of thought, in fact by such a critic as Mathew 
Arnold, that miracles or supernaturalism 
are no part of Christianity, and that if 
either once served as evidence, which is very 
doubtful, of a superhuman, superscntient and 
purely divine religion, they certainly are not 
valuable as evidence to-day, as Gregg admits 
in his '* Creeds of Christendom." Even if such 
evidence were called for it would be useless 
in view of the fact that the very religion it 
seeks to define defines itself and is valid 
without it. So that all doctrines based upon 
that element of the Bible will not only receive 
no authority, but appeal to improbability or 
imagination. 

Hence Doctor Dix' theory becomes of no 
value, not through any support it may obtain 
from the Bible, but altogether because other 
denominations, exclusive of his own, make 
claims upon the Bible as valid as those which 
he champions. And they refuse to sacrifice 
name, distinctive sectarianism and other char- 
acteristics for what might easily be termed a 
*' difference without a distinction." 



43 

2. [Rev. James Wasson's theory.] We 
come now to a more telling question 
which, if rightly answered, will define the 
attitude of the church toward the world and 
her relation to her sister organizations when 
we inquire whether a Protestant union is 
possible and practical on an evangelical 
basis. 

A writer (Rev. James B. Wasson) in the 
May number of the Andover Review of i8S8 
in his article, ^' Is Protestant Union Possi- 
ble," while he courageously affirms that 
" The folly and uselessness of sectarianism 
are becoming more apparent every day," and 
that '* almost unconsciously to themselves the 
churches are finding the least common multi- 
ple of their dogmatic creeds, and are exhibit- 
ing this common multiple instead of their own 
special creed as the highest outlook of modern 
Christianity" — he yet seems to believe that 
*' If the whole of Protestantism to-day, by 
some strange revolution of thought, were 
suddenly to become Episcopal, or Baptist, or 
Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Congrega- 
tional, Protestantism itself as a whole would 



44 

not be essentially different in character, aim 
and spirit from what it is now." Protestant- 
ism as representative orthodoxy might be as 
he says. And yet by a rare inconsistency 
native to those who attempt to reconcile the 
opposite poles of religious thought, and make 
Galvanism appear on friendly philosophical 
terms with a broad and inclusive creed, he 
says in criticism of the recent scheme pro- 
posed by the Episcopal House of Bishops to 
bring about unity in the church, that every 
effort put forth by a division of the Christian 
church to monopolize Christianity will result 
in failure, and that the future church will not 
be the exact pattern of any church of to-day 
but will be the orderly and natural develop- 
ment of its aggregate Christianity, and will 
be built more upon the good that each may 
now possess and less upon the bad features 
which are so universally cherished. I declare 
frankly that in my judgment to unite 
the Protestant denominations and yet not 
materially change the character, aim and 
spirit of Protestantism is to foster a pious 
fraud and uphold what would prove to be as 



45 



imperial an institution as was ever contem- 
plated in the archives of mediaeval Catholic- 
ism. It would give to one organization an 
unbridled privilege not only to coerce a ma- 
jority of constituents to become the tool and 
sceptre of denominational infallibility, but to 
bring about a corruption perhaps only second 
to that which preceded the decline of the 
Romish Church in the Sixteenth century. 
But this we have not to fear for such an alli- 
ance although possible will not be feasible, 
and, if not practical, the movement toward 
the institution of such an alliance will never 
be popular or aggressive. 

The question is not whether the church 
ought to be Baptist, Unitarian, Episcopal or 
Congregational, but whether it should be what 
its founder designed, or if not that, whether 
it should not be humanitarian, emphasizing 
the deed more than the word and life rather 
than creed. It is not whether the Bible says 
this or that, but whether man is not more 
important than a theological controversy, and 
whether his salvation or happiness is not 
more needful than the discussion of 



46 



Christian polemics. If the churches of 
the kind we spoke cannot Christianize 
the very world over which its creed 
dominates and its denomination rules, 
a world in which the arts, sciences and indus- 
tries flourish while the souls of men are 
largely lost, if as organized they do not raise 
their voice against the wholesale legalized 
sins of society, what will we expect when all 
are arrayed under one evangelical head, 
having the same creed and the same aims ? 
I do not seek to discourage any efforts that 
other denominations may make in this direc- 
tion, but I simply give it as my opinion that 
unity is not what the evangelical church needs 
so much as a more rational creed and a 
crushing of the spirit of caste which is 
common in all churches of every denomina- 
tion. If an alliance could be organized where 
truth would be sought and advocated, and 
where no dogmatic tests would be applied to 
condition or define man's character, then a 
great work could be done which would make 
the new results of church labor when com- 
pared with the present appear as " ossa to a 



47 

wart/' I sometimes fear that the effort 
which will be made to unite churches and 
amalgamate denominations will be in its 
nature a compromise, by no means acceptable 
to a large and worthy class of ethical leaders. 
For then we shall have in a unit what now we 
have in parts with no especial advance 
toward the reign of love and fraternity 
in society. Instead of having many enemies 
in the household, we shall have a few whose 
strength will be increased by accumulation, 
as Samson's strength was increased by the 
profuse growth of his locks. 

Under this head there is still another diffi- 
culty in the way of Protestant unity, viz., 
denominational propagandism. The church 
seems more anxious that man should accept 
her creed than live the simple life of 
honesty, more anxious that he should sub- 
scribe to her social organization than act the 
law of love. Each denomination seems to be 
alert and working for prejudices, and hence 
so much pride and egotism is wrapped up in 
religious organizations that truth must go 
abegging for disciples. Then, again, the 



48 

church seeks to popularize the doctrine that 
although virtue is its own reward, yet a moral 
life alone is not a Christian life, that a man 
may be honest and just here, but yet may be 
lost so far as the hereafter is concered, that 
God is not omnipresent or imminent in 
the every act of his children. Hence false 
lives, like false faces, are seen everywhere in 
society. Hence a great many, like Catherine 
Leyburn in Mrs. Ward's famous novel, are 
conscientious wives, sympathetic neighbors, 
dutiful parents for Christ's sake or the reward 
of heaven. The Pharasaic life of Newcome^ 
which has in it much of the pulse of modern 
Christianity, made Robert Elsmere affirm 
that could he but see life and God for one 
hour as Newcome saw them, he would cease 
to be a Christian in the next. It is true that 
much of the Christian ministry is broad- 
spirited and humanitarian, but it is compelled 
to abide within the limitations of a fossilized 
creed and is not, always, in fact is rarely at 
liberty to preach the gospel of the order of 
the universe. 

3, [The Liberal's theory.] Since it 



49 

is impossible to get the church as a 
corporate body to unite upon an intellectual 
platform of belief, why, says the liberal, could 
she not unite in emphasizing the moral side 
to the religion of Jesus? Lyman Abbott, in 
a terse and forcible article on the ** Unsettled 
Questions of Theology," maintains that the 
great religious question centres about three 
words, the " Bible, redemption and God " 
While I believe this to be true in part, I yet 
believe that the great religious question should 
centre about the word happiness.'^ It is the most 
plausible feature of this theory that on a priori 
grounds it seems very feasible. For in its 
defense it may be argued that a man might 
believe in fetichism, polytheism, mythology, 
theism, with or without anthropomorphic- 
habiliment, or the most ultra atheism, and yet 
act morally — live the doctrine of the moral 
law — and although refusing to accept what 
Dean Stanley said of the Sinaitic revelation \ 

*Note5. 



t In speaking of the old stone tables of law, he said, they 
" represent to us the granite foundation on which the world 
is built up, without which all theories of religion arc but as 
shifting and fleeting clouds ; they give us two homely 



50 

he may in his life incorporate as a law of 
conduct its essential commandments ; or a 
man may disbelieve the miracles of the Bible, 
thus denying and repudiating all forms of 
supernaturalism, and yet so far as his char- 
acter is concerned live a happy life. 
It is, indeed, one of the stupid and most 
audacious claims of the religious pedant that 
a profession of faith of some sort is absolutely 
essential to the life of mankind. In one 
sense, indeed, this is true, yet the church 
is rather justifying the man who leads a natural 
life, whether he believes or disbelieves her 
doctrines, and is specifying those who are 
usually classified as agnostics, infidels and 
atheists as exemplary Christians by their life. 
In the church, as well as in the world, the 
parable of the good Samaritan is becoming a 
fact of common occurrence, thus illustrating 
the relation of Christian to Christian, in spite 
of belief, and the contact and co-operation of 
all classes of people on a common basis of 
morals. It is, therefore, asserted that the 

fundamental laws which all subsequent revelation has but 
confirmed and sanctified — the law of our duty toward Grod 
and the law of our duty toward our neighbor/' 



51 

Christian church may become a unit on the 
moral side of Christianity, if she were willing 
to discard what may seem to be the present 
cause of her multiplicity and division of 
organization. Perhaps no union, if effected, 
would bring about more beneficent results to 
the world than the unity of the church upon 
the basis proposed by the liberal. It certainly 
would divert the eye of man from what is of 
the future or the next world to what is here 
of this world, and it would make man's life 
not only expressive of the Golden Rule, and 
an illustration of the fact that while we are on 
this earth our duty is here, but give religion 
the laissez-faire of growth, and allow all 
things to take their place and have their way 
as God designed. 

Beautiful and efficient as this theory is, it 
must be dismissed as impracticable. The 
question is, will the church allow her distinc- 
tive doctrinal differences to be thrown aside 
for the formation of an ecclesiastical fusion 
by which the ethical side to Christianity alone 
will receive emphasis? Will she consent to 
abolish name and polity for spirit and aim ? 



S2 

Will she be ready to teach pure morals free of 
Christian dogmatism ? It is becoming to be 
one of the most common yet serious facts of 
the closing years of this Nineteenth century 
that the principle of centralization which this 
very theory points to, which a denomination 
illustrates, and which has ever proven in the 
Greek and Latin church to be a mighty power 
for the operation of ecclesiastical law, espec- 
ially during the periods of reconstruction, 
when the new faith and the old came into 
bitter antagonism, and when, as is natural, 
man will make significant departures from old 
beliefs and do what his conscience or his 
genius will direct him to do, has made and is 
making the body appear more important than 
the spirit, the organization more valuable than 
the principle, and a denomination more use- 
ful than the life it represented or represents. 
Every effort made in the direction of a unity 
of the church upon an ethical Christian basis 
will be thwarted as long as the Bible continues 
to be a fetich, and Christianity is neither 
accepted nor rejected as a fact of nature. A 
unity of all Protestant evangelical churches 



53 

might more easily be effected on this basis 
than a unity of Protestant liberal with Catholic 
and Protestant evangelical churches, and yet 
even such a unity might hardly survive its 
birth. For methods of work would involve 
changes in the whole structure of the unified 
church which would result in the abandon- 
ment of the scheme before it had become an 
applied experiment. Even if it should be 
allowed that the church as organized might so 
remain as long as she combined her foci of 
energies upon the purification of the world by 
an emphasis of the morals of Christianity, it 
would be more than doubtful whether the 
world would really be the happier for such a 
union. It would, as a movement, exhibit on 
its very face an hypocricy of character that 
would handicap the work, jeopardize the 
cause and make the church less popular than 
she is. It would forcibly illustrate the un- 
willingness of the church to drop names, 
all sectarian spirit and that detestable egotism 
by which men are judged, and come out boldly 
as one body and one life for the end in view. 
And whatever might be Sdid m defense of such 



54 
a union this one terrible defect would tend to 
make the church a laughing; stock before the 
world. 

To effect such a unity it would not only 
require an immediate and miraculous educa- 
tion of those who compose the church, but a 
shifting of modes and motives of living which, 
if attempted, would precipitate the church into 
worse perils than those which she seeks to avoid. 
It would compel her to abandon Christianity as 
a religion and accept what it now vigorously 
opposes — natural religion. The ethical 
theory presupposes an almost ideal or highly 
cultivated state of man — a state in which 
man's egotism shrinks into nothingness — 
which, by some, is said to account for the par- 
tial unpopularity of the theory. It savors, it 
is alleged, too strongly of rationalism ! It 
tends to abolish all that goes to make Christi- 
anity a superior and an exceptional religion, 
and it rushes man into positions where a 
belief in supernaturalism become the coup dc 
grace of human folly. To be sure it would put 
an end to the polemical controversies which for 
1800 years have eclipsed religion, yet many 



55 

believe that it is a dangerous expedient — a 
compromise which may jeopardize the useful- 
ness of the Christian church. 

The fact is plainly this, the church is un- 
willing to surrender what she considers an 
essential feature of her mission — the saving 
of the world by a word or a proposition, or 
what not — by anything except God's method. 



PART III. 

What can or will be done? Obviously 
nothing by those whose prejudice exalts 
ignorance into some peculiar kind of a cultus ! 
Nor will anything be done by those who 
glorify their own judgments and deify their 
own egotism. It is not my place to utter a 
prophesy, which, like that of Cassandre, will 
have the benefit of disbelief. The question, 
however, may here be asked, might not a church 
arise that will go the full circle of truth, that 
will convince men of the fact that the universe 
is right, that will revivify what will yet be 
considered the chief and humble attitude of 
man to man, the attitude which was so beauti- 
fully exhibited in Jesus, "the judge not at 
all," and that will show that love, and love 
alone is the highest and most divine quality 
of life ? From the lower to the higher types 
of being, the growth in the direction of love 
is most manifest. Where true wisdom pre- 
dominates there love altogether abounds. 



57 

What is Christianity but an attempt to explain 
the method of the universe ? Can the church 
— can man himself have a higher destiny 
than that which is the incarnation of this 
method ? And is not this method altogether 
described and limited by the word love ? In 
terms which are easily understood, might one 
not hope that the hour is drawing near when 
man will be called '* God intoxicated," as 
Spinoza was defined, when no one will judge 
his brother, when the life of humanity will be 
ameliorated by the idea that the universe is 
right, when the thought of Sterne, that **God 
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," will 
have an equal application to all life because 
God is all in all. A church then that will ex- 
plain to man the method of the universe at 
all events that will show how all of man's ex- 
periences, whether of pleasure or pain, hap- 
piness or misery, are ordered of God,* and 
that he can, because God so wills it, move in 
the direction of least resistance and greatest 
pleasure or in the way of great resistance and 
bitter pain, and that whether he be in hell or 

♦Note 3. 



58 

heaven, so called, it is the advantage of life, 
that will not exalt her egotism into a standard 
of morality by which man is accounted good 
or bad, but leave the vilest sinner to the mercy 
of God or be God to him, such a church will 
draw all men to her because no one could re- 
sist such ravishing love, no one could with- 
draw from such divine presence. So far as 
our knowledge of human nature goes we learn 
that no one is free willed and yet we know 
that we act always in the direction of what we 
think is our highest happiness.f For example 
were I to offer to a thousand people the choice 
of taking a fiwt or ten cent piece from my 
hand I could easily determine which one they 
would take. It would most certainly be the 
ten cent piece. Nor is this what is commonly 
called selfishness. Rather is it the law of God 
— a part of our mechanism. And yet the tak- 
ing of the five cents might have brought to them 
all the very happiness which they missed by 
taking the ten cents. Nor is this strange. We 
vibrate between ideas that bring us pain and 
pleasure, (which by some, chiefly Hegelians, 

tNote 4. 



59 

is considered one and the same thing), and 
we act when moved by wisdom and love in a 
manner that results in joy. Why is it, I may 
ask for the sake of argument, hypothetical as 
it may be, that I go to one church rather than 
to another— prefer to choose certain men and 
women for friends and reject others — eat a 
sour apple rather than a sweet one — elect an 
agitated, social to a quiet, solitary and dreary 
life ? It is because I think, or rather because 
I know, that my fate or my highest happiness 
is thus assured. When I see a blind man on 
the street why is it that I unconsciously am 
moved to pity, and to benevolence ? Mainly 
and altogether because if I did not seem to 
help him by my pity or money I should be 
very miserable, and yet,-as I have often after- 
ward discovered, my pity and mo«ey were put 
to the worst possible use. Yet I could not at 
the time help myself. This experience was as 
much an integral part of my life as the lily of 
the valley is a part of the universe. What 
the Church or what ethical philosophers have 
usually called interested and disinterested af- 
fection are produced by one and the same 



6o 



motive. Having abundance I cannot under- 
stand, or I am not made so that I can under- 
stand that giving a dollar to a needy person 
will bring me pleasure, so I keep my money 
for my own enjoyment. On the other hand^ 
having money I can see, or I am made so that 
I can see, how giving a dollar tea needy per- 
son will make me happy, so I send forth my 
money for my own enjoyment. The one is 
called interested, the other disinterested affec- 
tion, and yet they are prompted by self-inter- 
est, or the desire to procure happiness. The 
man who practices the one may not be as help- 
ful to his fellowmen as the one who practises 
the other, yet the latter should not sit in judg- 
ment upon the former. Perhaps, some one 
right here might say: *^If this is true then 
why not use all of our money upon self ? By 
charity we thought that we were practising 
religion. The thought is but a play upon 
words as empty of substance as a shadow. If 
such actions are not built upon the facts of 
the universe, if they are not the result of 
man's mechanism, then wisdom is a blind 
leader of the blind. We act as we are made 



6i 

and we can no more choose to do otherwise 
than can a negro elect to become white. Nor 
does a man give charity for any other reason, 
if he will stop to consider, than for his hap- 
piness. If he were not charitably disposed 
he would be most miserable, and he loves to 
assist the unfortunate because he cannot help 
himself.* Here it would not be impertinent to 
remark that ideas are the breeders of senti- 
ments and sentiments are the precursors of all 
manner of calamity. True ideas are what we 
are all in need of — at least some of us — where- 
by our harmony with God can be restored or 
acquired. 

The old religion then of which I speak is 
the religion which, although old, is ever new, 
although ancient is ever modern, although 
natural is yet revealed, although past is yet 
present. It is the light that dispels the dark- 
ness. It is the compass whose needle points 
us to God. It is that which outlives dogma- 
tism, sectarianism, sophistry, egotism, theology 
and which no one mind can exhaust nor mon- 
opolize, as no one brook can mirror all the 

*Note 5. 



62 

stars, and which is the very substance of what is 
commonly defined as Christianity. I lay no 
especial emphasis upon the name. Names are 
at best but feeble expressions of realities. 
What is gravity but a name of something we 
cannot describe ? Religion as here used is thus 
but a name for the same thing which gravity 
fails to define. The thing itself is God, so 
much we know. God is the alpha and the 
omega. 

How, it may be asked, will one go to work 
reforming the world ? What can or should we 
do ? It must be said in answer to these in- 
quiries that the world does not need reform- 
ing. The universe is all right. Our egotism 
makes it wrong. If as it can be shown man's 
greatest happiness lies in the direction of 
broadest love — in the very gravity of love it- 
self, then unconsciously and irresistibly he 
will seek to give his brother the harmony he 
possesses. It will be his greatest pleasure, in- 
deed, his only aim in life to help man to be 
happy. What the Church has been teaching 
for nearly 1800 years is the gospel of misun- 
derstanding, by which each man is trying to 



63 

mould the other into one or the same type of 
being, to make other men get happiness as he 
gets it. The universe, yes, God himself is 
for the time eclipsed by human egotism. 

Four things the Church may well afford to 
emphasize and they are briefly these: 

I. The universe is right. 

2 Trust in God. 

3. The Gospel of love. 

4. Judge not at all. 

It is needless to say that such doctrine 
would bring harmony more completely to 
men, and if lived give men the happiness 
they covet. For if it be true, as I have 
no hesitancy in believing that love always 
brings us our deepest joy, then our fate must 
be in the acceptance of love, for God is love. 
Love and the issue of things always go to- 
gether. *' It is so," said Mathew Arnold, ** and 
this is what makes the spectacle of human 
affairs so edifying and so sublime. The world 
goes on, nations and men arrive and depart 
with varying fortune, as it appears, with time 
and chance happening unto all. Look a lit- 
tle deeper, and you will see that one strain 



64 



runs through it all; nations and men, whoever 
is shipwrecked is shipwrecked on co7iduct. It 
is the God of Israel steadily and irresistibly 
asserting himself, — the Eternal that loveth 
righteousness y 

If a religion or system of morals had never 
been formulated man would not be without a 
method of life. We ourselves are our best 
and most efficient bibles. No evidence of 
historical testimony about the way of life is 
quite as important as our own experience. 
Given a universe in which man is destined to 
acquire his highest good, how can anything 
be a better means to the end than conduct or 
experience ? Man is seeking his highest en- 
joyment so far as he dares and whether he 
takes the path of least or greatest resistance 
he will always tend toward his own harmony 
and gravitate toward his highest good. How 
may we know our highest good is a question 
which can easily be answered. Our highest 
good is always determined by our perfect hap- 
piness. For both are interdependent. The per- 
son who moves in the path of greatest pain 
knows that another path if obtainable would 



65 

be more satisfying. And so he will tend to- 
ward the path of greatest happiness forever 
and ever, until unconsciously, perhaps, the 
highest good or supreme love or grace or wis- 
dom will be to him the way of his destiny. 
That men will persuade each other to come 
where full and perfect enjoyment can be found 
is possible, because their sympathetic relation 
bids them to alleviate suffering and ameliorate 
the condition of thobe who have been led into 
the path of misery. And they would be un- 
happy would they not do this. It is their mech- 
anism. It is, therefore, of indifferent interest 
whether society or the Church exalts into a 
cultus the mechanism or gravity of the mem- 
bers and declare it to be the infallible creed 
of conduct provided the members obtain there- 
by their highest happiness, cease to judge^the 
motives of their neighbor, announce that the 
universe is right. 

A man may disbelieve the bible as the 
Church interprets it, he may repudiate the 
idea of redemption, he may know nothing of 
God except the fact that he is his child, or 
that which he may reason out by his faculties in 



66 



the work of self-apprehension, but he can 
and must have complete confidence in God in 
spite of himself. The Church is or should be 
organized to benefit man, to elevate society, 
to purify the state, to adorn a civilization 
along the line of love and fraternity. She 
was not founded, as I understand it, to be a 
constructive civil power, organized to build 
a kingdom within a kingdom or to become a 
great and powerful autocracy as she undoubt- 
edly became in the middle ages, nor to become 
what might easily be termed a separate insti- 
tution whose sole object of existence might be 
parasitic, although all these experiences have 
seemed to be a part of her destiny, but she was 
founded to persuade man to God's will. It 
should have been regarded as a matter of little 
concern whether year after year she counted 
her spoils as a pious nun counts her beads, or 
as a merchant figures up his profits, and it 
should have been considered a sure indication 
of her usefulness if year after year, not by sta- 
tistics alone, but by the reign of wisdom, man 
was shown to be no longer a slave to his baser 
nature. 



67 

In view of the fact that I seek to build a 
church upon this method, or effect a union 
of the Church upon what may be called a 
strictly natural basis, the question will be asked 
— " If this method is to be our guide what 
authority will we have for our morals ?" What 
matters it whether we have any demonstrative 
authority whatever, so long as the method is 
imperial and God sovereign. Men said that 
Jesus discovered a new religion in the sense 
that one discovers a continent or a star. He 
simply discovered the method of the universe 
— a method by which we perform God's will. 
He saw how we were as fated as a tree, bles- 
sed with the idea of doing what we like, while 
all the while we were fulfilling the order of 
his providence. And it was on this account 
that he seemed to be a great philosopher in 
that he refused to ascribe to himself a glory 
for self-righteousness and condemn another 
for what the Church has ignorantly called a 
sin. To God we do what we cannot help — we 
love or hate, if you please, because either act 
proves to be a part of our fate. If a man's sym- 
pathetic relation is so strong that he irresist- 



68 



ibly rushes into acts of benevolence,why should 
he say **I am thereby better than the man 
whose malevolence is his mechanism?" Neither 
of them are accountable so to speak! Hence 
the egotism of the Church, of moralists and 
theologians, in popularizing the doctrine that 
some men are holier than others. I am not 
here defending a man who commits crime. I 
am simply not judging him. Who knows but 
that the criminal by his crime has apprehend- 
ed the method of the universe ? I agree with 
my critic that the end seems to cruelly justify 
the means but in what other way, pray, and 
by what other means could the end have been 
reached ? It might have been reached in other 
ways, perhaps, but the man who is wild enough 
to commit crime can reach God in no other 
way. This is so because it is so. It may seem 
to some that God is cruel to allow men to 
plunge headlong into peril, drink deep of the 
bitterness of sophistry, go as did the prodigal 
to the very depth of misery and despair and 
yet if men must be led aright by no other 
means, if they are so constituted as to reject 
grace or refuse wisdom what other alterHative 



69 

can there be ? Just such experiences are the 
wisest provisions for bringing man to him- 
self. They point 

" Towards some infinite depth of love and sweetness, 
Bearing onward man's reluctant soul."" 

It was ignorance that led Byron to exalt 
wantoness into an horrible cultus by which he 
frittered away his life; and it was ignorance 
which not only led Paracelsus to die a drunk- 
ard on a tavern floor, but Napoleon Bonaparte 
to leap from the edge of a sword into a fool's 
paradise. And yet I have confidence in the 
order of the universe by which love is vindi- 
cated and God's law glorified even by the 
depth of misery into which genius plunges or 
the terrible catastrophe of a planet. Such 
events may seem inexplicable, but can the 
issue be a matter of conjecture ? 

But, says one, we should do right because 
the bible says so. It is reasonable to suppose 
that many men will ^be influenced by books. 
If you discard the bible I fear says another 
that we shall have no authority for the very 
method of which you speak. Let us see. 
Without entering into any logical extensions, 
I might answer this last statement by saying 



70 

we cannot escape our limitations, we cannot 
do altogether as we sometimes might like, we 
cannot essay to control God. ** Who by tak- 
ing thought, can add one cubit to his stature,'' 
said Jesus. There may, on the other hand, be 
two reasons why a thing is right. One is be- 
cause it is right — that is because it is the law 
of God. The other is because it is rational. 
It is rational to obey the law of God, 
and whatever is rational is right. The 
moral law (and by this I refer exactly to the 
method of which I spoke) the law by which 
we measure our highest joy, and not the law 
by which I have a right to impute anyone in 
sin is a part of the law of our being. It is 
that part of the gravity of the universe by 
which men have been able to discern their 
limitations. But as popularly interpreted 
it is the yard-stick of character. Could we 
conceive of anything as more ridiculous than 
this ? Could we devise a more shocking trav- 
esty on the goodness of God ? 

Were the church to work along the four 
lines already mentioned it could no longer be 



71 

said by C. M. Morse, as was said in the Forum^ 
It is one of the most deplorable facts of mod- 
ern history that the church should have fallen 
so far from its purpose that a prominent cler- 
gyman could say without fear of contradic- 
tion that Christianity bears no particular rela- 
tion to the religion of Jesus, that doctrinally 
it is of Paul and the other theologians and 
that socially it is of the earth, earthly. It is 
true that the fashionable church is a natural 
product of the present social system as in the 
mission chapel, the pawn shop, the palace and 
the tenement. The reason why in our city 
churches we often find the rich absent when 
the poor predominate and the poor absent 
when the rich predominate is because social 
caste tyranizes over American society. Christ- 
ianity ought to be **a furnace to fuse all ele- 
ments into a homogeneous mass," to make a 
reality the fact that we are all children of the 
same God, to certify by law as well as in 
character that we are the sovereigns of the 
earth. The church that will work along this 

* "We have a moneyed aristocracy, a political dictatorship, 
landed proprietors, a rapidly increasing tenant population, 
the 'working man' and the tramp."'*' 



72 

line will bring the great mass of the people 
up into the law of love and God.* N. P. 
Oilman in his recent work on "Profit Sharing" 
believes that the brightest day man may ever 
see will break over the world when the spirit 
of the gospel enlightens economic science and 
when pure Christianity to which Leclaire gave 
expression in his last will and testament is 
the strongest force making for industrial and 
social progress. When man discovers and 
puts in practice, as Macauley wrote of Fen- 
elon, *'those principles which it now seems 
impossible to miss — that the many are not 
made for the use of one; that the truly good 
government is not that which concentrates 
magnificence in a court, but that which dif- 
fuses happiness among a people," then the 
pulpit can well afford to be missed. In 
1840, when William E. Channing gave 
his famous lectures to the mechanics of 
Boston on **The Elevation of the Laboring 
Classes," he said that the very first object of 
society is to give incitement and means of 
progress to all its members— to bring about 

* Note 6. 



73 

the triumph of men's spiritual over their out- 
ward and material interests. *'What avails it," 
he asks, '^that a man has studied ever so 
minutely the histories of Greece and Rome, 
If the great ideas of freedom and beauty and 
valor and spiritual energy have not been 
kindled by these records into living fires in 
his soul." And likewise the question may be 
asked what avails it if while the church pros- 
pers in our midst man continues to be lost to 
himself and society to be honey-combed with 
all manner of misery. It might easily be con- 
ceived that such ideas tend to deepen rather 
than lessen the discontent in our midst, that 
they smack of revolution, that they deal with 
difficulties too deeply rooted in the common 
interests and laws of mankind to ever be re- 
moved. Be this as it may, the time is ripe 
for action. We have had enough of political 
effervescence, of rosewater religion, of politico- 
economic dilettanteism, of wide-mouthed rant- 
ing over the falsehood that the American 
government is one **of the people, for the 
people and by the people" when it is a fact, 
(which, as Bishop Potter recently remarked 



74 

is so wide-known that it seems grotesque even 
to speak of it), that since the dawn of our 
freedom as a nation we have drifted politically 
into all manner of corruptions, have gener- 
ated senates of millionaires who purchase 
their seats and legislate for the interest of 
the favored class, have done away altogether 
with Jeffersonian democracy, have made gov- 
ernment a machine operative in the interest 
of a growing aristocracy, have made elections 
subserve the base designs of office-seekers 
and the system of spoliation, and have intro- 
duced to the world a condition of things in 
which it could be said that the courts, the 
police, the army, the church, all exist to de- 
fend and justify a system of living where the 
many are the slaves of the mighty and where 
oppression, poverty and crime threaten to de- 
stroy the commonwealth. Such a condition 
of things would disappear before the love of 
God if men would cease to be moved by false 
judgments and act so far as it is possible in 
the direction of fraternity. Such mis- 
ery as infests the world would no longer exist 
if man would not allow his egotism to lead 



75 

him into the very hell of conduct. In this 
age who of the Platonic school that mused 
over the dream of their master's Republic or 
who of the disciples of Jesus that hung upon 
the ravishing beauty of that kingdom which 
was to develop in the earth by the fraternal 
spirit of God's children, would ever have 
thought that an era in civilization would come 
when men's prejudice would turn a paradise 
into an hell and distort for self-aggrandizement 
the richest heritage of morals that man may 
ever possess — the law of love ? We may be 
better circumstanced than the generations of 
the past and blest beyond the prophesies of 
the bible and yet men are not fraternal. And 
after iSoo years of experimental religion it is 
but an insult to the founder of Chistianity to 
say that we have lived and we do live the 
golden rule. To our regret, and in justice to 
Jesus, it must be said that the golden rule has 
not been applied to government, nor has it 
been carried very far into what are termed 
the morals of society. 

The silence of the church in view of this 
fact is her own reprobation. She must speak 



76 

the truth or like many other corporate instit- 
utions be buried in the grave dug by her o ^ n 
hands and sink into moral obloquy and ob- 
livion. 

Man asks for or needs at this hour no other 
religion than Christianity naturalized or one 
in which truth is glorified. Indeed the church 
should not attempt the hard task of serv- 
ing God and Mammon, but accepting wisdom 
as her most trustworthy revelation she should 
strike out upon a track worthy of her aims. 
The church should make no compromise with 
the world to gain its support, an error of 
which the present church is guilty, nor should 
she appeal to sensationalism to fill the pews 
or popularize the pulpit, although to do so in 
this age seems to be a means of carrying 
truth home to the masses. She should accept 
as her cult a creed more inclusive than Gali- 
lean and historical Christianity, never, how- 
ever, outgrowing the ideal example of the 
Nazarene. She should not be Christian in 
the very exclusive sense but Christian if the 
method of Jesus accords with God's law. She 
should emphasize truth wherever found and 



77 

preach it free of denominational fetters. She 
should work not only with the eddies of the 
great sea of trouble but, as one of our own 
writers has aptly said, she should cause the 
storms, though grand to cease, that the sea 
might show the stars. She should be cath- 
olic in the broadest sense and foremost in all 
righteous movements. She should not, nec- 
essarily, labor to have all the religious forces 
centre into one common institution, becoming 
thereby an ecclesiastical octupus, crushing 
and destroying the liberties of man, yet she 
should be comprehensive, positive, aggres- 
ive and democratic. The church might be 
denominational but only so to perpetuate her 
independence and liberty and not to become 
boastful and imperial. She ought to give a 
scholarly and rational interpretation of the 
manifold bibles of the world and seek to im- 
press upon men the fact that human life is 
broader than any creed, religion more in- 
clusive than any 'Msm," that it is the very will 
of God. I know that an immense amount of 
good is being done by the church to-day, but 
as Emile de Laveleye has well said, -^There 



78 



is in human affairs one order which is the 
best; that order is not always the one which 
exists; but it is the order which should exist 
for the greatest good of humanity," and I 
believe that our duty is to establish the church 
which shall exist for the greatest good of hu- 
manity. The time was never more opportune 
— the need was never more pressing. To use 
the allegorical language of John, the church 
of which we speak, emblematic of the beau- 
tiful woman clothed with the sun that retreat- 
ed into the wilderness to escape the ravages 
of the monster dragon whose slimy tail drew 
the third part of the heaven, will receive the 
help of the earth, and recovering strength 
will blot from out the face of time the scourge 
and leprosy of egotism. 

The old faith has long ago decayed and, 
like some weather-beaten and dead tree, it 
stands as a useless monument of a great re- 
ligious past. At the base of this tree are the 
feeble yet promising sprouts of a more glor- 
ious faith. The very elements and conditions 
w^hich killed the old are the elements and 
conditions which feed the new. And by- 



79 

and-bye in its own season will this new 
faith mark man's triumphant unity with 
his God and his complete n^astery of him- 
self. In this new faith Jesus is restored 
to the world as he was before ''credulous love, 
Jewish tradition and Greek subtlety had at 
once dimmed and glorified the truth." Re- 
ligion has been made natural. It is has been 
placed upon the ''rock" and not upon the 
ever-shifting sand, upon the law of the uni- 
verse, and not upon what is and will yet come 
to be preposterous and stupendous imagery. 
The church will do well if she accepts as 
her alternative this religious cult as the means 
to the end for which she was instituted, work 
courageously to elevate man by natural 
methods, rely wholly upon a rationale of 
judgment which wisdom gives and not seek 
the living among the dead. So the torch of 
God will pass on its way, hand reaching out 
to hand. 



NOTE I. 



The following forcible utterance appeared in the NewjYork 
Sun of March 4, 1889. It is well worth reading as showing 
how a Bishop of the American Episcopal Church speaks 
of the peril which besets the Church: 

"Bishop Huntington to-day was asked by a Sun correspond- 
ent for an elaboration of his views on this subject. 

' My views, ' he said, ' have never been concealed, and I am 
entirely willing to state them to the public at any time and in 
any form. That commercial forces are pushing their way in- 
to the Church is very obvious. This is seen repeatedly in the 
election of vestrymen. Spirituality seems often no longer the 
test of a church official; business success, high social position, 
shrewdness in the conduct of affairs are coming to be consid- 
ered the more important qualifications for a good vestryman 
or trustee. I do not refer to the Episcopal Church alone, but 
to churches in general. The man poor in spirit, but rich com- 
mercially, is preferred as a church officer to the man poor in 
worldly goods though rich spiritually. There are numerous 
instances daily before our eyes of men holding high places as 
chm'ch officials who would not hold such high position were 
spirituality the test of office. 

This commercial tendency is also obvious in the pew renting. 
The rich occupy the choice places, while the poor must sit in 
the obscure, out-of-the-way corners. The Church becomes a 
club house, and this amounts in cases to the exclusion of the 
poor. If the Church was to be merely a means of providing 
comfortable incomes for Sunday orators and C03ey seats for 
wealthy listeners, the pew-renting system might be a success. 
But as the Chm-ch is for a common salvation of rich and poor 
alike, no system that shuts out the poor or puts the rich into 
a fashionable house, with a saint's name, at one ^end of the 



82 

town and the poor into a bare chapsl by themselves at the 
other end, can ever be a system that God will prosper. There 
is all that class of persons who in this generation are servants 
and laborers, but whose children in the next generation wilj 
be the lords and ladies of the land, all of whom, under the 
pew system, are just as completely and effectually excluded 
from the house of God as though it were written upon the 
door, ' No admittance for servants and laborers here."' The 
system virtually cuts off from the sound of the gospel and 
from all heavenly helps of the Church a portion of every pop- 
ulation. It is well nigh impossible, with the commercial influ- 
ence to the front, with property as the controlling element, 
that the spiritual interest should not suffer. The question how 
costly a pew or how high a tax the parishioner can afford will 
obscure very often those simple merits of a meek and lowly 
heart. If it could be known openly in how many parishes at 
this moment some influential and managing men are secretly 
discussing the question of how thej^ shall contrive to get rid 
of the minister they have, because he is not paying well in 
pew rents, or how they shall find one that will do that, an ap- 
peal of alarm would arise to to the ears of God, 

I have long been an advocate of the free church system. I 
don't believe men should own the Church at all. It should be 
as free as the winds of heaven. The Church is not here on 
sale. It is a gift. It should be such that people of every na- 
tionality, every race, every color, every condition, would be 
welcome. The doors should be open wide. No one should be 
excluded by class or social distinctions. 

Cathedrals built as an investment in real estate or to give 
distinction to the city, instead of being built for the worship- 
pers, is another instance of the commercial influence. An- 
other commercial intrusion is the elaborate and costly church 
or ecclesiastical singing. 

The intrusion of politics into the Church is not seen per- 
haps in any rivalry of the opposite pohtical parties to gain 
control of the Church, but I know of cases where rich parish- 
ioners have endeavored to influence the politics of their cler 



83 

^ymen, and, not only that, but when displeased would even 
l)y withdrawing some of their customary support render the 
situation most embarrassing. I fear it is true, too, that rich 
parishioners do not disdain to influence the political course of 
their employees, operatives, or clerks, and even the poorer 
members of the church. 

Contributions to high and sacred undertakings are not meant 
to be wrung out of people's fingers by rhetoric and declama- 
tion, by agents, by fairs and lotteries, by a sense of respecta- 
bility, or by amiabile deference to the pastor's expostulations. 
The commercial influence shows its predominance in this di- 
rection also. In prosperous times like oiu*s, and in affluent 
communities, antichrist goes himself tp church, patronizes 
preaching, buys a pew, gets himself elected to the vestry, and 
takes a hand in shaping the pohcy of the establishment, and, 
by blandishment or bluster, in pitching the keys of the pul- 
pit. All that you may hear said of the mischief of this secu- 
lar corruption in disordering Christ's fanaily, vitiating doc- 
trine, emasculating the manhood of the ministry, and lower- 
ing the standard of personal righteousness, rather understates 
than exaggerates the fact. It is not scientific doubt, not 
atheism, not pantheism, not agnosticism, that in our day and 
in this land is likely to quench the light of the gospel. It is 
a proud, sensuous, selfish, luxurious, church-going, hollow- 
hearted prosperity. The door by which this has gained offic- 
ial entrance is the pew-renting system. Coming in by that 
door it would intrench itself about the very altar and debase 
the clergy itself.' " 

NOTE 2. 

Said C. M. Morse in the February Forum, in the summing 
up of the whole matter: 

"The time was when in our land there was no recognized 
antagonism between the working classes and the churches. 
It is a new problem in our civilization. The cause should be 



84 

easily discovered by unclouded eyes. Fifty years ago, aristo- 
cratic pretensions were looked upon as vagaries and treated 
with contempt. In the churches people felt nothing of the 
chill of caste. A glance at the centers of population must 
convince us that now all is changed. There is an evident riv- 
alry in the erection of splendid edifices and in the social and 
oratorical qualifications of the ministry. The poverty of the 
workingman's home is accentuated by comparison with the 
richness of the sanctuary. The chief seats are vivid with 
purple and fine linen. Outside the house of God exists a so- 
cial aristocracy, bulwarked by inferior cliques, and governed 
by unwritten rules, marking distinctions between man and 
man. We have a moneyed aristocracy, a political dictator- 
ship, landed proprietors, a rapidly-increasing tenant popula- 
tion, the 'workingman^ and the 'tramp.' With the vast 
augmentation of wealth in the possession of the few and the 
increasing pressure of poverty in the many, the time is at 
hand when there will exist between classes gulfs as impas- 
sable as that between Dives and Lazarus. Intensifying social 
struggles are working a transformation in the character of 
the Church, as is manifest from the new terminology coming 
into general use, such as ' star preachers,' ' wealthy congre- 
gations,' and ' our poor charges.' The obverse of this is found 
in the expressions of the workingmen: ' We can't dress well 
enough to go to chm*ch;' ' your leading members don't notice 
us on the street;' 'your preachers run after the rich;' 'the 
ministers side against us in the matter of strike.' If present 
social conditions can be justified, these phrases, caught from 
the lips of the toilers, are simply excuses inspired of the 
devil for non-attendance upon religious services. The discon- 
tent has, however, a basis in fact; but they who give utter- 
ance to it do not understand the underlying principle, and 
hence cannot formulate it. With social inequality among 
members outside the Church, there cannot be religio-social 
equality within it. The great human heart of the people com- 
prehends in some measure the fact that Christianity is not a 
cement to hold a rich veneer to a body of inferior materials. 



85 



"but a furnace to fuse all elements into one homogeneous mass. 
Under present conditions it is sheer folly to talk about the 
rich and the poor meeting together in the house of God; the 
poor decline the invitation. How can the Church regain in- 
fluence with the workingmen ? By teaching God's will con- 
cerning social questions while insisting upon piu-ely spiritual 
matters. By presenting Christ as the Son of man as well as 
the Son of God. By preaching morality along with religion. 
For what purpose did God fill the storehouses of nature? Are 
toil and poverty the outcome of God's intention, or are they 
the results of violations of divine laws ? Has religion any- 
thing to do with business, social and political questions ? Does 
God design the bounties of nature for the benefit of a favored 
few, or to satisfy the natural craving of all men ? Did Christ 
intend that his doctrines should burn selfishness out of the 
human heart, secure justice for all, and abolish involuntary 
poverty from the world ? Are present conditions just, and if 
not, where does the injustice inhere ? Shall the Chiu-ch be 
supported by a 'better class,' and be constituted the protector 
of the rights of property, or shall it be the friend and cham- 
pion of the poor and helpless ? The Church is thought to have 
given exclusive attention to spiritual truths, and to be posi- 
tive in its denunciation of only such evils as are prohibited by 
civil statutes. It has insisted upon the command, ' Love the 
Lord thy Grod with all thy soul,' apparently in the belief that 
the enforcement of this doctrine would result in the abolition 
<of all the evils that afflict society; while the equally import- 
ant and binding injunction, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' 
has been reiterated, but never thoroughly defined and ex- 
plained. If a small percentage of the volumes in our theo- 
logical libraries had been devoted to a discussion of man's 
duty to his fellow-man, the thought and investigation essen- 
tial to such a consummation would have brought light to great 
realms of present darkness. The Church has been reaching 
down into a sin-polluted pool to rescue individuals, but has 
given little attention to the causes which render the pool im- 



86 

pure. Why do covetousness and class distinctions prevail ^ 
Manifestly because the rewards of society— ease, pleasure, 
popularity— are heaped upon those who possess wealth. How 
does it happen that the bounty God has provided for all men. 
is enjoyed by a class to the exclusion of the masses? The so- 
lution of this problem involves the examination of an indus- 
trial system which produces such results, and a comparisou 
of it with the spirit of the teachings of our Savior. Such a 
procedure would soon array all the forces of righteousness 
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, work the 
the purification of society, and bring about the reign of uni- 
versal peace. Such are some of the questions that must be 
investigated, answered or ignored. Evils are not righted by 
bulwarking those who profit by them, but by listening to the 
clamor of the oppressed. If they are ignored, the laboring 
men will resolutely spurn the invitations of a gospel that has 
a promise of eternity, but that does not compel justice in the 
conduct of its professors here. K an honest and impartial 
investigation be made; if the toilers see that the Church is 
sincerely anxious to protect them from the rich men who 
keep back their hire, to condemn the usury that devours wid- 
ows' houses, to stand as a mountain cliff in the way of op- 
pression and injustice, then they will flock to it as doves to 
the windows, and be loyal to it in the ultimate result. The 
social problem must be worked out by the followers 
of the peasant philosopher in whose doctrines the weary 
and heavy-laden find rest. The saints will again have charge 
of Caesar's household, and men will no longer hate the name 
of God." 



NOTE 3. 



Speaking of the prevalence of evil in the world— a condition 
of things which will remain inexplicable as long as man is 
controlled by certain egotistic ideas of morals, John Fiske, in 
*^The Idea of God,''^ remarks: "If the Creator of such a 



87 



world is omnipotent he cannot be actuated solely by a desire 
for the welfare of his creatures, but must have other ends in 
view to which this is in some measure subordinated. Or if 
he is absolutely benevolent, then he cannot be omnipotent, 
but there is something in the nature of things which sets lim- 
its to his creative power.'' 

Fichte touches upon a suggestive thought when he says, 
" Nothing individual can live in itself or for itself; but all live 
in the whole, and this whole unceasingly dies for itself in un- 
speakable love, that it may rise again in new life. This is the 
spiritual law ; all that comes into being falls a sacrifice to an 
eternally increasing and ascending life; and this law con- 
stantly rules over all, without waiting for the con- 
sent of any. Here alone lies the distinction, — whether man 
allow himself to be led, with the halter round his neck, like a 
beast to the slaughter, or freely and nobly brings his life a gift 
to the altar of the eternal life, in the full fore-enjoyment of 
the life which is to arise from its ashes.'' 



NOTE 4. 



Rev. Doctor E. G. Robinson, President of Brown University 
maintains in his recent work on Ethics that, "He alone is, 
therefore, in the highest and fullest sense free who conforms 
himself most completely to the conditionating laws of his 
own moral being — to the laws grounded in the inexorable de- 
mands of his own moral nature. Obedience and freedom al- 
ways coexist and other things being equal they are always 
commutual. He is the freest moral being who is most punc- 
tiliously obedient to all moral laws ; just as the freest civil 
community is where all just laws are most completely obeyed. 
And hence the truth of the following paradoxes: — The high- 
est freedom is the completest subjection to law; the freest 
beings are morally the most necessitated to do right; perfect 
moral freedom is identical with moral necessity; the absolute 
freedom of an infinite supreme will is one with the inexorable 
necessities of an infinite and consequently unchangeable na- 
ture." 



88 



NOTE 5. 



Says M. J. Savage: *' If all the time and money and enthus- 
iasm and effort had been spent in co- working with the real 
God in delivering the real man from his real evils, long before 
this the world might have been the Eden that never was, and 
that never will be mitil men inteUigently combine to save 
man here and now from the ills that all can see and feel.'^ 
And Rev. Doctor Gladden declares that the Church is begin- 
ning to see "as it never saw before that Christianity is not 
exclusively a scheme for the transportation of a portion of 
the human race away from this world to a more congenial 
home beyond the skies, but a plan for the reorganization of 
life upon this planet; a plan that includes every department 
of human action— business, politics, society, art, education, 
amusement, aU the interests of life.'"' 



NOTE 5. 



(For second reference to Note 5 see Note 6.) 

The object and end of life is nothing if not happiness. For 
anything other than this is incompatible with any rational 
idea of God's benevolence. I think we are more justi- 
fied in asserting that God is benevolent (that he is 
conditioned by the same circumstances which, in a 
measure, exhibit themselves upon the stage of human 
life), than that he is omnipotent. If, as many be- 
lieve, he is all love, and that there enters into his nature no 
element of injustice or malelovence, then we have a right in 
affirming that whatever is is right. It is true that this 
reasoning does not appeal to the logical faculty, yet it may for 
all that be consistent with truth. 



89 

NOTE 6. 

This doctrine of the universe formed the most conspicuous 
feature of Christ's teaching, and it entered into and became 
a working idea of his remarkable career. It more than any 
other thing defined his morals and went far toward the con- 
struction of a doctrine of fatalism in which the sovereignty 
of God and free will of man became no longer the dreadful 
nightmare of the brain. It contrasted most remarkably in 
his day with the self -righteousness and egotism of dominant 
sects, and as a doctrine it cut into the human pride and 
vanity of the Pharisees, Saducees and Rabbis, who became 
notorious in history as judges of men''s lives. Jesus was 
always mindful of a differentiated humanity. He, perhaps 
miore than any other morrlist, understood the method of the 
tmiverse. No one in later years, not excepting Spinoza and 
Hegel, expressed in so short a life a more glorious and com- 
plete philosophy of conduct or a view of the universe that 
will forever stand the test of experience. It is to be remarked 
that after all has been said for or against Christianity as a 
supernatural religion, the one great and comprehensive fact 
remains— the fact which Mathew emphasized in the last of 
the sixth and all of the seventh chapter of his gospel, the 
fact which distinguished Christianity from all ethnic religions, 
viz., God's complete and sovereign control of the universe as 
the only possible basis for the construction of a philosophy 
of life. That this view has not received the prominence it 
deserves among the clergy is due partly to the fact that as a 
doctrine it has but recently been received. Like all truth it 
has suffered by the exaltation of man's egotism. 

It is indeed to be deplored that man in our day has exalted 
into authoritative morals a standard of life which is the 
corrolary of his own mechanism. That which God has seen 
fit to make the means of each one's happiness man has pro- 
jected into some kind of a code of laws by which the majority 
are able to condemn the few, or vice versa. In other words, 



90 

what distinguishes each one of us many have made the basis 
for a religion by which one class of individuals is declared to 
be holier than another class. Take for an illustration the 
parable of the good Samaritan. No story of contemporaneous 
life better illustrates the condition of human nature. It 
strikes at the very root of the evil which in the day of Jesus, 
as well as in our own made egotism, the most popular cult of 
humanity. It shows vividly and forcibly the unalterable and 
diversified state of human nature by which one man is most 
happy where love is potent, and another presumably happy 
where the sympathetic relation is far from normal. A cer- 
tain Jew in passing from Jerusalem to Jericho — a journey 
which was surrounded by hardships and involved in peril — 
fell unfortimately among thieves who plundered him of his 
wealth and left him half dead along the road side. A priest 
and Levite with little, if any altruism, when they saw him in 
passing went by on the other side, while a Samaritan, who 
from birth and by education was taught to be prejudiced 
against the Jew, was so moved with compassion that he went 
to him and helped him. The question Jesus now asks is, 
"Who proved a neighbor to the man who fell among the 
robbers ? " And the lawyer to whom the question was 
addressed answered by saying, " He that showed mercy on 
him.'' Jesus did not judge the motives either of those who 
passed the man by or the one who helped him. On the con- 
trary, he realized that the one was no more accountable for 
his conduct than the others were for theirs, and that both acted 
from motives of self interest. For the Samaritan who ren- 
dered the Jew assistance would no more have been happy 
by pgissing him by as did the priest or Levite than you or I 
would be in allowing some child to lie wounded and crying on 
the pavement before us. By nature our mechanism would 
impel us into loving conduct, because it would not only be the 
way of least resistance, but the way of happiness. We are 
not constituted to choose any other alternative, and to act 
contrary to our mechanism is not only impossible, but is the 
precurser and cause of misery. Did the Samaritan debate 



91 



the fact with himself that he was taught to hate the Jew, to 
treat him with unf raternal relation, to ignore him when in 
danger and allow him to sink helplessly and cruelly into an 
untimely grave ? It was impossible for him under any cir- 
cumstance to do otherwise than he did, because God made 
him sympathetic, because a certain amount of grace, which 
was lacking in the priest and Levite, impelled him into loving 
conduct, because he, like Jesus, not only delighted in acts of 
charity, but preferred to love his fellow man, because he felt 
most happy in doing so. To glorify their own egotism and 
pass judgment upon their fellowmen is what might easily 
have been expected from the priest and Levite. In this- 
Jesus was right in advising the lawyer to become charitable 
and sympathetic to his fallow men, for in no other way could 
he prove his love to God. The lawyer, we must remember, 
professed to accept the law of Moses, and yet he was imf ra- 
ternal— he refused to accept every man as his brother— he 
loved his money more than he did his God. It would not be 
impertinent to say that on one occasion Jesus fully illustrated 
the point I wish to make. A certain lawyer asked him which 
was the great commandment in the law. And Jesus answered, 
"Thou Shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.'' This was the great 
and first commandment. And the second is like unto it, 
*'Thou Shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.''' In what was 
this second commandment similar to the first ? In this— it 
was its application— its proof —the test of belief in the firsts 
In no other respect could they be similar. To love one 
another is to love God, or to love God is to love one another. 
This is the whole of the law and the prophets, said Jesus, 
this is religion— this is the way into paradise. 

How easily could we conceive of two lines of duty emanating 
from the general mechanism of the parties in the parable 1 
The Samaritan might be so influenced as to consider himself 
by his act of mercy holier than the Levite or priest who 
passed his brother by on the roadside. And by a similar 
egotism the Levite or the priest might be led to exalt his own 



mechanism into a moral cultus. Both by missionary zeal 
and proselyeting could be able to build up organizations— for 
what human nature is in one man it may be in other men — 
and hence in defense of certain beliefs many would give 
theit" labor, money and influence. And so two sects might 
co-exist, both for the purpose of human happiness, ond yet 
both using their own mechanism as the basis of their creeds. 
It could easily be seen that the one would have no deahngs 
whatever with the other sect — that fraternity between them 
would be impossible. How prone one religious denomination 
or some very sectarian member of it is in asserting egotism 
may be recognized in the Chinese walls which are built up 
between sects and individuals. How unchristian a church is, 
may be seen in the judgments which she passes upon a sister 
church, seen in the ecclesiastical and social caste, seen in the 
unwillingness of members to patronize the store of a heretic, 
seen in the refusal of a minister to recognize all the ministry 
as brethren and all men as the beloved children of Gk)d. 
Judge not at all, said Jesus. 

We, in this modern world, have yet to learn that altruism 
is the only way of love and light. Not that God is not bring- 
ing all His children up into grace by devious paths, but that 
perfect joy can only come where perfect love prevails. We 
have, I fear, exalted our prejudices into all manner of creeds 
by which we try not only to bring about a imiformity of 
reUgious type, to make all men believe as we do, as if this 
were possible, but by which we measure the moral worth of 
people, judge of their actions and thus become the apparent 
arbiters of their lives. Hence one of the most amusing things 
in the church is the easy disposition of members to seek 
everywhere for praise for doing what is generally conceded 
to be a good act, which is in reahty but the result of their 
mechanism. To boast of a good act which we perform, as if 
it were miraculous or extraordinary, is foolish enough ; but 
to grow insolent, abusive and misanthropic because the 
world refuses to canonize us is the depth of folly. Society 



93 

with the absence of grace is not only a travestry upon the 
benevolence of God, but is a most palpable exhibition of 
egotism. What are called popular moral standards are not 
only the reflections and exhibitions of man's peculiar vani- 
ties, but the pitiful and futile attempts of man to right the 
universe ! One man is judged bad or good if he conforms 
with our special codes of moral law, while in the main we by 
our judgments make evil possible. W. H. Mallock, in "Is 
Life Worth Living ? '^ states the case very clearly when he 
writes, "The right path is right beeause it leads to the 
highest kind of happiness — the wrong paths are wrong be- 
cause they lead to lower kinds of happiness."" In either 
choice happiness is the end to be attained, and yet none 
would argue that the one path is, while the other is not, in 
conformity with God's will. Nor are we — nor have we the 
right to sit in judgment against our brother who by sophistry 
elects the path of lesser happiness or misery. Herein lies 
the calamity of modern social and religious precedents and 
herein is the church her own assassin. The fatal error of all 
our thinking is, I fear, the authority we exhibit over the lives 
of our fellow men— the tendency we show to sift the charac- 
ter of humanity through our sieves of egotism — the audacity 
we manifest in measuring everybody by what appears to be 
curbstone law, and the moral standard popularized by the 
consensus of mankind. What we call evil is indeed but the 
method of the universe, and it is certainly both grotesque and 
amusing to hear men speak of God's law as separable from 
his will, or attribute to natural causes what is easily in- 
terpreted by God's benevolence or omnipotence. Can any- 
thing be conceived of as more absurd than the judgment 
men pass upon each other's characters ? Can anything 
indeed be farther from grace than the habitual judgment 
which is passed upon the apparent sins or shortcomings of 
man ? What right have I, because forsooth I love to go to a 
certain church, delight in certain habits, take pleasure in the 
society of certain friends, or enjoy certain food, to condemn 
or judge my brother because he is amused by other things,? 



94 

What right have I, to go still deeper in the problem, because 
some brother is being led to the path of least resistance or 
greatest pleasm-e, by means of the path of greatest resistance 
and deepest pain, is being impelled into grace and love by 
means of mm-der, theft, impiety, lust, vice (the so-called sins 
of the morals), to say that I am hoher than he because I 
naturally tend to the path of least resistance while he, by 
his mechanism, can be led to God in no other way ? The fact 
is that in spite of all we can do, for we will act one way or 
another as long as we live, God is sure to lead us up to where 
he wishes. What we call sin is made sin because it is action 
which disturbs the sympathetic relation of the universe— it 
brings pain, misery, suffering into the world. And yet it is 
not the act which proves the absence of God. On the con- 
trary, God is in sin so-called as He is in everything else. [Sin 
is not so much the violation of a law, but the doing or execu- 
tion of the law. The same motive — love of happiness — which 
as altruism makes some sigh for lives to help and love and 
bless — as egotism makes others rave for hves to curse and 
maltreat. God leads all men safely from pain and misery, 
transforming the vilest wretches finally into the angels of 
heaven. Some will not murder, steal, covet, bear false witness, 
commit vice, do any of the acts which bring men into pain 
and misery because they prefer to move in the path of least 
resistance, they delight to love their f ellowTuen, they are so con- 
stituted that it would be impossible for them to be imkind, 
unjust, unlovely. They are, I may say, so full of grace or love 
or God that they must and cannot help loving the imiverse just 
as a star cannot help shining, the wind blowing, the flowers 
blooming. 

Indeed, when we sift the fine moral discriminations of 
actions to their ultimatum, you will find that enjoyment is 
the object and end of all our toil. This is exactly why God 
made us, and this is why we act as we do. The fact is, there 
are too many in the world who take too small a view of God 
and His universe, man and his destiny. They construct 



95 

expedient paths rather than discover right ways into suprenoie 
joy. They are fearful that man will miss paradise, and so 
they labor to win him to their methods of thinking. They 
have what might consistently be called Ptolemaic views of 
life. They revolve, or, are apt to revolve, everj^hing about 
their own mechanism. The fact is, they have really no confi- 
dence in God, are certain that the universe is wrong, and 
that man is sinking into sure annihilation. It is well for man 
to be interested in the welfare and happiness of others — this 
he can neither avoid nor escape, because it is the means to 
the highest possible happiness. To judge people insane or 
foolish, or even vicious, who are neither able nor constitutad 
to understand Ufe as we do, who are unlike ourselves, is 
making our egotism our wantonness, is putting a false con- 
struction upon God's providence and beneficience, is pervert- 
ing the beautiful significance of the universe. From such 
people come, I fear, the judgments which breed so much 
evil in our midst, which build up caste, which alienate 
family from family, which make religion subserve the 
interests of each one's mechanism, and which grow and 
popularize the idea that one man who is a Doctor Jekyll is 
better than one who unfortunately is a Mr. Hyde Is it not 
true, as Shakespeare has said, that 
"All the world's a stage. 
And all the men and v/omen merely players ; 
They have their exits and their entrances, 
And one man in his time plays many parts." 

And although one man may have power to be Hamlet, King 
Lear, Romeo, Macbeth, Richard the Third, or even Shylock, 
he is what he is by the same inexorable law which makes one 
star differ from another star in glory, or one man like the 
firm beach and another like the ever-tossing wave. Peculiarity 
and difference, versatility and variety make this universe 
interesting, dramatic and spectacular, and God has so wisely 
ordered our lives that what seems to be accident, misfortune, 
sin, violence and abuse, are steps by which 

"We mount from the lowly earth to the^vaulted skies," 
and attain our greatest happiness. 



By /. C. F, GRUMBINE. 

A THIRTY-TWO PAGE PAMPHLET, NEATLY BOUND. 



^=I^ZCE: iO CE1^T'3:B. 



PRESS NOTICES. 

*' A powerful sermon.''''— i'v'ei/; Yorh World, 
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'^ A question w^hich is at present agitating alike the bosom 
of both pulpit and pew receives vigorous handling in this lit- 
tle treatise by a writer whose ability to cope with the subject 
was testified in his lately published ' Evolution and Christi - 
anity/ * * * The breadth between the walls of Mr. Grum- 
bine's ideal Church is refreshing, and, although its air may 
be too rarified for the comfort of all his readers, it is an at. 
mosphere to which they must become acclimated, to a certain 
extent at least, in the general development of the argument 
which is inevitable, and in which this present discussion is an 
opening wedge.'' — Buffalo Express. 



CHARLES H. KERR & CO., Publishers, Chicago. 
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